On the Black Hill

by Bruce Chatwin

  Ten hours, twelve hours, the twins had to work all day till they collapsed, except of course on Sundays when the family did nothing but worship.

  The Chapel at Maesyfelin was one of the oldest Non-Conformist chapels in the country.

  A long stone building, devoid of decoration but for a sundial over the door, it lay between the stream and the lane, encircled by a windbreak of Portuguese laurel. Alongside was the Chapel Hall, a corrugated structure painted green.

  Inside, the walls of the chapel were whitewashed. There were oak box-pews and plain oak benches, and on the pulpit were written the names of all the former ministers – the Parrys, the Williamses, the Vaughans and Joneses – going back to the days of the Commonwealth. At the east end stood the communion table carved with the date of 1682.

  In India, Mary had watched the ways of Non-Conformist missionaries, and for her the word ‘Chapel’ represented all that was harsh and cramped and intolerant. Yet she masked her feelings and consented to go. Mr Gomer Davies was so blatant a fraud, surely it was best to let him go on bamboozling Amos, who would, one day, come to his senses? She sent a note to the vicar explaining her absence. ‘A passing phase,’ she added as a postscript; for she was incapable of taking it seriously.

  How to keep a straight face as Mrs Reuben Jones pounded out the hymns of William Williams on the wheezy harmonium? Or at the warbling voices and wobbly feather hats? Or the men – sensible farmers all week – now sweating and swaying and hooting ‘Hallelujah!’ and ‘Amen!’ and ‘Yea, Lord! Yea!’ And when, in the middle of the 150th Psalm, Mrs Griffiths Cwm Cringlyn reached for her handbag and pulled out a tambourine, again Mary had to close her eyes and suppress the temptation to giggle.

  And surely the sermons were absolute rubbish?

  One Sunday, Mr Gomer Davies enumerated all the animals aboard the Ark and at evening service he excelled himself. He stationed five lighted candles on the rim of the pulpit so that, when he pointed his finger at the congregation, five separate shadows of his forearm were reflected onto the ceiling. Then, in a low, liturgical voice, he began, ‘I see your sins as cats’ eyes in the night …’

  For all that, there came a time when it shamed her to think that she had mocked these austere ceremonies; times when the Holy Word seemed to set the walls a-tremble; and one particular time when a visiting preacher overwhelmed her with his eloquence:

  ‘He is a Black Lamb, my beloved lamb, black as a raven and chief among the thousand. My beloved is a White Lamb, a ruddy lamb and chief among the ten thousand. He is a Red Lamb. Who is this that cometh out of Edom, his garments red, from Bozrah? Is this not a Wonderful Lamb, my brethren? O my brethren, strive to lay hold of this lamb! Strive! Strive to lay hold of a limb of this lamb …!’

  After the sermon, the preacher called the worshippers to communion. They sat on benches, the husbands facing the wives. Along the length of the table stretched a runner of freshly laundered linen.

  The preacher cut the loaf into chunks, blessed them and passed them round on a pewter plate. Then he blessed the wine in a pewter cup. Mary took the cup from her neighbour and, as her lips touched the rim, she knew, in a flash of revelation, this was the Lord’s Feast; this was the Upper Room; and all the great cathedrals were built not so much for the glory of God as the vanity of Man; and Popes and bishops were Caesars and princes; and if afterwards, anyone reproached her for deserting the Church of England, she stooped her head and said, simply, ‘The Chapel gives me great comfort.’

  But Amos went on raving and ranting and suffering from migraines and insomnia. Never – even among fakirs and flagellants – had Mary encountered such fanaticism. In the evenings, straining his eyes in the lamplight, he would comb the Bible for vindication of his rights. He read the Book of Job: ‘“My bones are pierced in me in the night season: and my sinews take no rest …”’

  He threatened to move away, to buy a farm in Carmarthenshire, in the heart of Wales. But his bank account was empty, and his thirst for vengeance rooted him to the spot.

  In March of 1912, he caught Watkins in the act of hacking down a gate. There was a fight: he staggered home with a gash above his temple. A week later, the postman found the Watkinses’ mule by the laneside, still breathing, with a pile of intestines spilling out on to the grass. On April Fool’s Day, Amos woke to find his favourite dog dead on the muck-heap; and he broke down and blubbed like a baby.

  Mary saw no end to the misery. She looked at herself in the mirror, at a face more grey and cracked than the mirror’s pitted surface. She wanted to die, but knew she had to live for the twins. To distract herself, she read the novels she had loved as a girl – hiding them from Amos, who, in his present mood, would burn them. One wintry afternoon, drowsy from the fire, she dozed off with a copy of Wuthering Heights open on her lap. He came in, woke her roughly, and slammed the corner of the binding into her eye.

  She jumped to her feet. She had had enough. Her fear had gone and she was strong again. She stiffened her back and said, ‘You silly fool!’

  He stood by the piano, shaking all over, with his lip hanging loose – and then he was gone.

  There was one course open to her now – her sister in Cheltenham! Her sister who had a house and an income! From her writing-case she removed two sheets of notepaper. ‘Nothing’, she concluded the final paragraph, ‘can be lonelier than the loneliness of marriage …’

  Before breakfast next morning, Amos trundled the milk-churn from the dairy and saw her hand the envelope to the postman. He seemed to know each line of the letter. He tried to be pleasant to the twins, but they returned his advances with a steely stare.

  As her black eye subsided and turned a yellowish purple, Mary felt more and more elated. The daffodils were in flower. She began to forgive him and, from his guilty glances, she knew he accepted her conditions. She resisted the temptation to gloat. The letter came from Cheltenham. He was terribly nervous as he watched her slit it open.

  Her eyes danced over the spinsterish handwriting, and she threw back her head and laughed:

  ‘… Father always said you were headstrong and impulsive … No one can say I didn’t warn you … But wedlock is wedlock … a binding sacrament … and you must stick to your husband through thick and thin …’

  She said, ‘I’m not even going to tell you what’s in it.’ She blew him a kiss. Her lips trembled with tenderness as the letter flared up in the fire.

  18

  SIX MONTHS LATER, Benjamin had shot up in height, and was three inches taller than Lewis.

  First, he grew a wispy black moustache and the fuzz spread over his cheeks and chin. Then his whole face came up in pimples and he was not a pretty sight. He was ashamed and embarrassed to be so much bigger than his brother.

  And Lewis was jealous – jealous of the broken voice, jealous even of the pimples, and worried he might never grow as tall. They avoided each other’s eyes, and the meals went by in silence. On the morning of Benjamin’s first shave, Lewis stamped out of the house.

  Mary fetched a dressing mirror and set a basin of warm water on the kitchen table. Amos whetted the razor on its leather strop and showed him how to hold it. But Benjamin was so nervous, and his hand was so unsteady, that when he wiped away the lather, his face was covered with bleeding cuts.

  Ten days later, he shaved again, alone.

  Often, in the past, if either twin caught sight of himself – in a mirror, in a window, or even on the surface of water – he mistook his own reflection for his other half. So now, when Benjamin poised his razor at the ready and glanced up at the glass, he had the sensation of slitting Lewis’s throat.

  After that, he stubbornly refused to shave until Lewis had grown as tall, and grown a beard. Mary watched her sons and sensed that, one day, they would both slide back into the old, familiar pattern of dependence. In the meantime, Lewis was flirting with girls; and because he was limber and attractive, the girls egged him on.

  He flirted with Rosie Fifield. They exchanged a breathless kiss be
hind a haystack and held hands for twenty minutes at a choral evening. One moonless night, strolling along the lane to Lurkenhope, he passed some girls in white dresses searching the hedgerow for glow-worms. He heard Rosie’s laughter, rippling clear and cold in the darkness. He slipped his hand around her satin sash, and she slapped him:

  ‘Get ye away, Lewis Jones! And take your big nose out of my face!’

  Benjamin loved his mother and his brother, and he did not like girls. Whenever Lewis left the room, his eyes would linger in the doorway, and his irises cloud to a denser shade of grey: when Lewis came back, his pupils glistened.

  They never went back to school. They worked on the farm, and providing they worked in tandem they could do the work of four. Left alone – to dig potatoes or pulp the swedes – Benjamin’s energy began to fail, and he would wheeze and cough and feel faint. Their father saw this and, with a farmer’s eye to efficiency, he knew it was useless to part them: it took the twins another ten years to work out a division of labour.

  Lewis still dreamed of faraway voyages but his interest had shifted to airships. And when a picture of a Zeppelin appeared in the newspaper – or the mention of Count Zeppelin’s name – he would cut out the article and paste it in his scrapbook.

  Benjamin said that Zeppelins looked like cucumbers.

  He never thought of abroad. He wanted to live with Lewis for ever and ever; to eat the same food; wear the same clothes; share a bed; and swing an axe in the same trajectory. There were four gates leading into The Vision; and, for him, they were the Four Gates of Paradise.

  He loved the sheep, and the open air made him strong again. His eye was quick to spot a case of pulpy kidney or a prolapsed uterus. At lambing time he would walk round the flock with a crook on his arm, checking the ewes’ teats to make sure the milk was flowing.

  He was also very religious.

  Crossing the pasture one evening, he watched the swallows glinting low over the dandelion clocks, and the sheep standing out against the sunset, each one ringed with an aureole of gold – and understood why the Lamb of God should have a halo.

  He would spend long hours patterning his ideas of sin and retribution into a vast theological system that would, one day, save the world. Then, when the fine print tired his eyes – both the twins were a little astygmatic – he would pore over Amos’s colour print of ‘The Broad and Narrow Path’.

  This was a gift from Mr Gomer Davis, and hung beside the fireplace in its frame of gothic niches.

  On the left side, ladies and gentlemen were strolling in groups towards ‘The Way of Perdition’. Flanking the gate were statues of Venus and the Drunken Bacchus; and, beyond them, there were more smart people – drinking, dancing, gambling, going to theatres, pawning their property and taking trains on Sundays.

  Higher up the road, the same sort of people were seen robbing, murdering, enslaving and going to war. And finally, hovering over some blazing battlements – which looked a bit like Windsor Castle – the Devil’s Attendants weighed the souls of sinners.

  The right side of the picture was ‘The Way of Salvation’; and here the buildings were, unmistakably, Welsh. In fact, the Chapel, the Sunday School and the Deaconesses’ Institution – all with high-pitched gables and slate roofs – reminded Benjamin of an illustrated brochure for Llandrindod Wells.

  Only the humbler classes were to be seen on this narrow and difficult road, performing any number of pious acts, until they, too, trudged up a mountainside that looked exactly like the Black Hill. And there, on the summit, was the City of New Jerusalem, and the Lamb of Zion, and the choirs of trumpeting angels …!

  This was the image that haunted Benjamin’s imagination. And he believed, seriously, that the Road to Hell was the road to Hereford, whereas the Road to Heaven led up to the Radnor Hills.

  19

  THEN THE WAR came.

  For years, the tradesmen in Rhulen had said there was going to be war with Germany, though nobody knew what war would mean. There had been no real war since Waterloo, and everyone agreed that with railways and modern guns this war would either be very terrible, or over very quickly.

  On the 7th of August 1914, Amos Jones and his sons were scything thistles when a man called over the hedge that the Germans had marched into Belgium, and rejected England’s ultimatum. A recruiting office, he said, had opened in the Town Hall. About twenty local lads had joined.

  ‘More fool them,’ Amos shrugged, and glared downhill into Herefordshire.

  All three went on with their scything, but the boys looked very jittery when they came in for supper.

  Mary had been pickling beetroot, and her apron was streaked with purple stains.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘You’re far too young to fight. Besides, it’ll probably be over by Christmas.’

  Winter came, and there was no end to the war. Mr Gomer Davies started preaching patriotic sermons and, one Friday, sent word to The Vision, bidding them to a lantern lecture, at five o’clock, in the Congregation Hall.

  The sky was deepening from crimson to gunmetal. Two limousines were parked in the lane; and a crowd of farm boys, all in their Sunday best, were chatting to the chauffeurs or peering through the windows at the fur rugs and leather upholstery. The boys had never seen such automobiles at close quarters. In a nearby shed, an electric generator was purring.

  Mr Gomer Davies stood in the vestibule, welcoming all comers with a handshake and muddy smile. The war, he said, was a Crusade for Christ.

  Inside the Hail, a coke stove was burning and the windows had misted up. A line of electric bulbs spread a film of yellow light over the planked and varnished walls. There were plenty of Union Jacks strung up, and a picture of Lord Kitchener.

  The magic lantern stood in the middle of the aisle. A white sheet had been tacked up to serve as a screen; and a khaki-clad Major, one arm in a sling, was confiding his box of glass slides to the lady projectionist.

  Veiled in cigar smoke, the principal speaker, Colonel Bickerton, had already taken his seat on the stage and was having a jaw with a Boer War veteran. He extended his game leg to the audience. A silk hat sat on the green baize table-cloth, beside a water-carafe and a tumbler.

  Various ministers of God – all of whom had sunk their differences in a blaze of patriotism – went up to pay their respects to the squire, and show concern for his comfort.

  ‘No, I’m quite comfortable, thank you.’ The Colonel enunciated every syllable to perfection. ‘Thank you for looking after me so well. Pretty good turn-out, I see. Most encouraging, what?’

  The hall was full. Lads with fresh, weatherbeaten faces crammed the benches or elbowed forward to get a better look at the Bickertons’ daughter, Miss Isobel – a brunette with moist red lips and moist hazel eyes, who sat below the platform, composed and smiling, in a silver fox-fur cape. From her dainty hat there spurted a grey-pink glycerined ostrich plume. At her elbow crouched a young man with carroty hair and mouth agape.

  It was Jim the Rock.

  The Joneses took their seats on a bench at the back. Mary could feel her husband, tense and angry beside her. She was afraid he was going to make a scene.

  The vicar of Rhulen opened the session by proposing a vote of thanks to Mr Gomer Davies for the use of the Hall, and electricity.

  Rumbles of ‘Hear! Hear!’ sounded round the room. He went on to sketch the origins of the war.

  Few of the hill-farmers understood why the murder of an Archduke in the Balkans should have triggered off the invasion of Belgium; but when the vicar spoke of the ‘peril to our belovèd Empire’ people began to sit up.

  ‘There can be no rest,’ he raised his voice, ‘until this cancer has been ripped out of European society. The Germans will squeal like every bully when cornered. But there must be no compromise, no shaking hands with the devil. It is useless to moralize with an alligator. Kill it!’

  The audience clapped and the clergyman sat down.

  Next in turn was the Major, who had been wounded, he said,
at Mons. He began with a joke about ‘making the Rhine whine’ – whereupon the Colonel perked up and said, ‘Never cared for Rhine wines myself. Too fruity, what?’

  The Major then lifted his swagger stick.

  ‘Lights!’ he called, and the lights went off.

  One by one, a sequence of blurred images flashed across the screen – of Tommies in camp, Tommies on parade, Tommies on the cross-Channel ferry; Tommies in a French café; Tommies in trenches; Tommies fixing bayonets, and Tommies ‘going over the top’. Some of the slides were so fuzzy it was hard to tell which was the shadow of Miss Isobel’s plume, and which were shell-bursts.

  The last slide showed an absurd goggle-eyed visage with crows’ wings on its upper lip and a whole golden eagle on its helmet.

  ‘That’, said the Major, ‘is your enemy – Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany.’

  There were shouts of ‘String ’im up’ and ‘Shoot ’im to bloody bits!’ – and the Major, also, sat down.

  Colonel Bickerton then eased himself to his feet and apologized for the indisposition of his wife.

  His own son, he said, was fighting in Flanders. And after the stirring scenes they’d just witnessed, he hoped there’d be few shirkers in the district.

  ‘When this war is over,’ he said, ‘there will be two classes of persons in this country. There will be those who were qualified to join the Armed Forces and refrained from doing so …’

  ‘Shame!’ shrilled a woman in a blue hat.

  ‘I’m the Number One!’ a young man shouted and stuck up his hand.

  But the Colonel raised his cufflinks to the crowd, and the crowd fell silent:

  ‘… and there will be those who were so qualified and came forward to do their duty to their King, their country … and their womenfolk …’